You know that scene in “Return of the Jedi” where Leia is choking Jabba the Hut with the chain, and he’s thrashing about trying to survive, but there’s nothing he can do? That’s the image that comes to mind when I think of Kodak now, the once powerful camera company.

And it may be a preview of what’s to come with RIM.

Kodak and RIM were both marketplace leaders at one point, and were the dominating forces in the camera and communications markets, respectively. Yet despite this dominance, both companies fell prey to the same basic problem: ignoring a known threat.

Kodak boomed in the 90’s, with the stock skyrocketing, which made investors ecstatic. Then digital cameras came onto the scene, and weren’t the same quality as film cameras. Seeing that the new entrant wasn’t a big threat, Kodak decided to ignore it. After all, the investors were happy, the company was making plenty of money, and the future seemed bright.

RIM is following a similar path. RIM was dominant, and despite seeing the arrival of iOS and Android, decided to do little about it. The customers were happy, the investors were happy, and the company was making money. Why change?

To be clear, many companies fail because an upstart comes along and takes away part of the revenue stream, seemingly out of nowhere. Yet the difference here is that Kodak and RIM not only saw the competition, but dismissed it out of hand. Sure, Yahoo was taken down by Google in the search engine space, but that’s not because Yahoo didn’t try to innovate. RIM and Kodak ignored new entrants, instead of taking them head on in a battle from the get-go.

But RIM could still recover. It could leapfrog the competition, and it could avoid the messylitigation that comes with a bankruptcy. What the company needs to do, and what Kodak never could do, is use the skills that it already has, and put them to good use in a new market. Instead of just focusing on the consumer electronics world, RIM could use its existing position in the cellular market and do some hardcore, Google X labs-esque research, not for the public, but to license out to other companies.

It may sound like being a patent troll, but there’s a way to do this well. If RIM was to follow the business model of LiquidMetal by creating new technology and selling it to companies like Google, Samsung, and Apple, it would access a clear revenue stream. This would allow the company to regroup, and possibly in a few years, it would be in a financial secure position enough to sell electronics directly.

RIM could do what other companies haven’t been able to do to survive the death throes. But it’ll take learning the history of other like-minded companies, and taking care not to keep on with the same mistakes.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]